New Approaches to International Collaboration in Time Use Research

This is a report on the 45th Conference of the International Association for Time Use Research, IATUR, which was held in Tokyo in November 2023. The conference theme was “Sustainable Society and Time Use Research.” A total of 24 sessions were organized, where over 60 presentations were delivered. The main focuses of this article are two of those sessions: ‘Gender inequalities in use of time’ and ‘Modern ways to collect time use data.’ In the session ‘Gender inequalities in use of time,’ research findings from a cross-national comparative study of ‘GenTime,’ a project at the University of Oxford, were presented. It was pointed out that women spend more time on work than men do, when combining unpaid work with paid work, in the surveyed East Asian and Western societies in common. Time use surveys can capture the time spent on unpaid work, such as domestic work, childcare, and nursing care by collecting 24-hour records of daily activities. Therefore, the amount of time for paid and unpaid work, measured separately by gender, has been regarded as one of the data which could indicate gender inequalities. In the session ‘Modern ways to collect time use data,’ web-based survey platforms that work on personal computers and smartphones were reported by research institutes in the UK and Belgium, respectively. Among them, “MOTUS,” Modular Online Time Use Survey, a platform developed in Belgium, was reported to be utilized for nation-wide surveys not only in Belgium but also in Germany. In Europe, international collaborations in the form of sharing survey platforms for time use data collection have started. It is vital to share the knowledge acquired from such practices in order to explore survey methodologies that are more efficient and in line with the times.